tokenecon — Token-Economics for Agentic AI

A dependency-free Python implementation of the token-economics cost model and tiered model routing design from the paper Token-Economics for Agentic AI: A Cost Model and Tiered Routing Reference (K. Pandey, Oct 2026).

The problem it solves: a single model call has a predictable price; a looping agent does not. Every tool call, observation, retry, and retrieved document adds another round-trip through a priced model, and teams usually discover the total from the cloud bill instead of the architecture. This package gives you two things:

1. A cost model — decompose per-task spend into prompt, completion, tool-call, and retrieval tokens, priced per model tier, so you can forecast and budget before deployment instead of reconciling after it.
2. A tiered router — classify each request by difficulty, send it to the cheapest tier capable of handling it, escalate on low confidence, and enforce per-task budgets that degrade gracefully instead of failing.

Install

pip install tokenecon

No dependencies. Python 3.9+.

From source: git clone https://github.com/karmendra8386/agentic-ai-token-economics.git && cd agentic-ai-token-economics && pip install .

Quickstart

from tokenecon import TieredRouter, DEFAULT_TIERS, MockModel

router = TieredRouter(tiers=list(DEFAULT_TIERS), budget=0.05)  # 5¢ per task
receipt = router.run("Summarize our Q3 cloud spend in two sentences.", MockModel())
print(receipt.pretty())
# request    : Summarize our Q3 cloud spend in two sentences.
# difficulty : 0.213
# outcome    : ok
#   step 1: tier=small in=210 out=120 cost=$0.000138 conf=0.70
# total_cost : $0.000138

Every run produces a receipt: tier used, tokens, cost, and confidence per step. Receipts are the unit of cost observability — accumulate them and they become the dataset your routing policy improves from.

Track a real Strands agent

The router above forecasts cost. To measure a live agent, point the CostTracker at any Strands agent — each event-loop cycle becomes a priced receipt step, using the token counts the provider already reported (no estimation, no heuristics):

from tokenecon.integrations.strands import CostTracker

tracker = CostTracker(tier="medium")  # or pass a tokenecon.ModelTier
agent("Summarize our Q3 cloud spend.")
print(tracker.receipt(agent, "Summarize our Q3 cloud spend.").pretty())
# request    : Summarize our Q3 cloud spend.
# difficulty : 0.213
# outcome    : ok
#   step 1: tier=medium in=1840 out=312 cost=$0.003088 conf=1.00 event-loop cycle 1
#   step 2: tier=medium in=2210 out=148 cost=$0.002802 conf=1.00 event-loop cycle 2
# total_cost : $0.005890

The integration is optional and dependency-free: it only reads the agent's event_loop_metrics, so strands-agents is never imported by tokenecon itself.

CLI

# Run 5 sample tasks through the router and compare against the all-large baseline
tokenecon demo

# Same, under a 1¢ per-task budget (watch guardrails kick in)
tokenecon demo --budget 0.01

# Forecast spend for a list of requests (one per line, no model calls)
tokenecon estimate requests.txt

# Bring your own tiers (JSON: {"tiers": [{"name": ..., "input_per_mtok": ...,
#   "output_per_mtok": ..., "capability": ...}]})
tokenecon demo --tiers my-tiers.json

How the router works

1. Classify — each request gets a difficulty score (0–1) from surface signals: length, analytical keywords ("compare", "design", "prove"), question marks, multi-step phrasing. Simple and replaceable; graduate to a learned classifier with labeled traffic.
2. Select — cheapest tier whose capability clears difficulty + safety margin. Falls back to the strongest tier; the router never refuses work.
3. Escalate — every response carries a confidence signal; below the quality threshold, the request cascades to the next tier (try cheap, escalate on doubt).
4. Budget — two guardrails, both degrade instead of failing:
   • Before spending: if the cheapest first step exceeds the budget, serve a cached answer for $0.
   • Before escalating: if the next tier up would break the budget, keep the current answer and mark the run degraded.

The tiering arithmetic: with planning fraction α ≈ 0.1 and price ratio r ≈ 30 between tiers, tiered cost is roughly 13% of the all-strong baseline — tokenecon.tiering_ratio(0.1, 30).

Honest limitations

• Pricing is illustrative. Default tiers are placeholders. Substitute your provider's actual price list before making decisions.
• Token counting is heuristic (~4 chars/token for English). Production use needs the provider's tokenizer or usage API.
• Confidence comes from the mock model in demos. Production needs a real signal: log-probabilities, a verifier model, or sampling agreement.
• Single-request scope. Multi-turn compounding (tool-call overhead, retrieval accumulation) is modeled in the cost equations but not executed by the router.
• See the paper (§6) for the full limitations discussion.

Cite

If you use this in your work, please cite the paper:

K. Pandey, "Token-Economics for Agentic AI: A Cost Model and Tiered Routing Reference," Zenodo, DOI 10.5281/zenodo.23195511, Oct. 2026.

A CITATION.cff is included for automated citation tooling.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.